E. D. Hirsch on Vocabulary

My former teacher E. D. Hirsch has been working for decades now to effect a transformation of American education. His career path has been a curious one. He began as a notable literary theorist whose book Validity in Interpretation articulated a strong defense of authorial intention as the proper standard of validity in interpreting literary texts. (The book has been much-loved by evangelical biblical scholars, many of whom seem not to have noticed that Hirsch’s arguments for authorial intention are purely pragmatic: he contends that literary scholars have a professional need for some standard of interpretative validity, so he just chooses authorial intent as the most effective option.)

But then, in the 1970s, Hirsch got interested in the teaching of English writing at the university level. Why do so many incoming college students write so poorly? And what can be done about it? These questions led him back a stage: What were these students taught in high school and before?

And that line of inquiry led Hirsch to the path he has been on ever since, and that he first pursued in his best-known book, Cultural Literacy: how to fix what’s broken in American education at the primary and secondary levels.

In a new article in City Journal, he makes a cogent case that educators need to give special and focused attention to increasing children’s vocabulary, because of the very strong correlation between an extensive vocabulary and academic and economic success later in life.

Because vocabulary is a plant of slow growth, no quick fix to American education is possible. That fact accounts for many of the disappointments of current education-reform movements. For example, the founders of the KIPP charter schools, which have greatly helped disadvantaged children, recently expressed concern that only 30 percent of their graduates had managed to stay in college and gain a degree. But note that KIPP schools typically start in fifth or sixth grade, and while KIPP’s annual reports show that their students achieve high scores in math, they score significantly lower in reading. I interpret those facts to signify that middle school is too late to rectify disadvantaged students’ deficits of vocabulary and knowledge. Word-learning is just too slow a process to close those initial gaps in time for college. The work of systematic knowledge- and word-building has to begin earlier.

I would make three practical recommendations to improve American students’ vocabularies, and hence their economic potential: better preschools, run along the French lines; classroom instruction based on domain immersion; and a specific, cumulative curriculum sequence across the grades, starting in preschool. Of these, the last is the most important but also the toughest to achieve politically.

It’s hard to achieve politically in part because people like Hirsch get stigmatized by the educational establishment as “reactionaries” because they want to establish stronger and more consistent standards for achievement.

It’s worth remembering that Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy appeared in the same year as Allan Bloom’s incendiary Closing of the American Mind and that the two were frequently lumped together as “conservative” responses to educational chaos. Bloom was a conservative indeed, of a highbrow and elitist stripe, but Hirsch has always been a committed political liberal: he has consistently stated that he wants a stronger educational system in order to address inequality and give the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised a better chance to succeed in American society.

Hirsch’s preferred policies may be right or may be wrong — that’s a debate for another day — but to dismiss them because of some purported but fictional “conservatism” is to practice the kind of epistemic closure that paralyzes our society in those very arenas where we most need creative change. At the very least this article, like everything else Hirsch has written on education in the past twenty-five years, is very much worth reading in full and reflecting on at length.

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9 Responses to E. D. Hirsch on Vocabulary

The loss of a vocabulary is another legacy of our losing a shared inherited cultural and literary legacy. When many people in the Anglophone world grew up reading the King James Bible, it not only gave them a shared set of cultural, literary, and historical references, but it gave them a pretty good vocabulary. And, as an added benefit, it was a good vocabulary for approaching Shakespeare.

I wish I could even suggest an answer to this problem. I grew up loving to read, particularly the encyclopedia and the dictionary. My parents had lots of books in the house. I can’t imagine how I would have turned out if they hadn’t, because, to be honest, I also watched (way too much) TV. I know intellectually that some kids grow up without learning to love reading and words and learning in general, but I have difficulty imagining what it must be like. But then, I teach Latin, so my view of the world is a bit skewed in any event. 😉

I’m not sure it’s fitting to characterize Harold Bloom as a conservative, much as he struck a blow against the complacent leftist educational establishment. To my knowledge, Bloom always disclaimed the conservative label. His critique of the vacuousness and relativism of American intellectual life derived from his liberalism; for Bloom the problem with Americans not being properly taught the inheritance of the West was not so much that this inheritance was to something to preserve for its own sake, but because it crippled them from attempting the search for Truth, which for Bloom was an open-ended endeavor.

Domain immersion means putting kids in situations that force them to learn new words in order to understand what they are being told and to communicate about their new experiences. Well off parents do this automatically by taking their kids on foreign trips, to karate lessons and museums and sporting events, buying them lots of interesting books and toys, reading to them from a variety of books, giving detailed explanations when their kids ask questions about science, history, and geography, and by talking about a wide range of subjects in the home.

Working class and poor parents (who also tend to be less educated parents) typically aren’t able to do any of these things very often and therefore their kids have, on average, a large vocabulary deficit by the end of elementary school.

Schools can partially make up for this deficit by having frequent field trips and by making reading class into “reading about local history” class one week and then “reading about astronomy” class the next week. The same goes for art class and so on. This requires resources that schools in lower income areas tend not to possess, and really needs to start in preschool when a significant vocabulary gap first starts to appear.

I also studied under Hirsch. He was, by graduate English terms, exceedingly conservative, which is to say anywhere right of Howard Dean. I wrote a seminar essay Cultural Literacy (for another professor). I think it’s a sound approach, if we could entirely avoid the issue of ideology–which we cannot. To me, oddest and most conservative about Hirsch was that he thought his approach devoid of ideology, whereas critiques from the left such as multiculturalism, were driven by ideology.

I’m surprised that you would consider wanting to “give the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised a better chance to succeed in American society” as an indicator that someone is liberal — don’t many conservatives think of themselves and their views as promoting that goal?

If I wanted evidence that Hirsch was not a “conservative,” I’d be more inclined to focus on his attachment to centralized standardization of the educational experience, and accompanying distaste for local variation and federalism.

Federalism, pluralism, and local control don’t strike me as having the adherence of either liberals or conservatives, especially when it comes to education, so I’m not sure what point the labels serve in any event.

I think Hirsch gets branded as right-leaning because of his disregard of motivation, interest, and individuality as part of learning theory. The “make ’em learn x, y, and z” approach to education takes insufficient account of the subjective experience of being on the receiving end of that kind of instruction, and of the boredom and alienation it can induce.

Peter Fitton said:
“Domain immersion means putting kids in situations that force them to learn new words in order to understand what they are being told and to communicate about their new experiences.”

Thanks for that definition. That is a large part of how we were educated at home, but I doubt my parents ever had a term for it. It was just the way they did things.